One of the Greatest Art Hoaxes of All Time. Would You Have Been Fooled?

We’re all sophisticated 21st-century art aficionadas, right? So I ask you: is there anything about the image pictured below, with its heavy-lidded, stringy-haired Jesus that says Vermeer to you? 

Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), Christ [or Supper] at Emmaus, Canvas, 118 x 130,5 cm, Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

I think we're all agreed: not even close! Then how did this ludicrous forgery by disgruntled Dutch artist Han van Meegeren fool almost everyone, including leading art experts of his day, and sell for the equivalent of $40 million in today’s terms? How did a similar, even cruder van Meegeren “Vermeer” wind up in the grubby hands of Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering as the crown jewel of his looted art collection? The answer to this and much more can be found in the stranger-than-fiction tale told by author Edward Dolnick in his 2008 best-seller The Forger’s Spell.

The story opens at the end of World War II in Nazi-occupied Holland, where a wealthy van Meegeren has been living in luxury at a time when many of his countrymen were starving and/or freezing to death. How was this possible?

After critics destroyed what had been at the start a promising art career, Van Meegeren wanted revenge. He set out to learn the forger’s art and create fakes that would destroy his critics’ reputations. The main problem he faced was how to create “oil” paint that would harden quickly and fool the experts.

By 1932 he had begun to experiment with Bakelite, one of the earliest plastics. After months of failed experiments, he finally came up with a mixture, that once painted on canvas and baked in an oven, looked authentic and passed the alcohol swab test for hardness--a tale-tell characteristic of old oil paint. He was on his way.

In a devilishly clever move, Van Meegeren decided not to copy any of the existing Vermeers that could be easily detected as frauds, but to create a whole new body of work in a different style. Loosely copying an existing Carravagio (Supper at Emmaus), whose work had influenced Vermeer, Van Meegeren painted Christ at Emmaus and put in motion a plan that would eventually fool the leading Dutch art authority of his day, Abraham Breius. But first, fictitious provenances had to be established, unscrupulous dealers found and above all, fragile egos manipulated.

By Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus (Milan), 1606. Brera Fine Arts Academy, Milan.The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148778

A few weeks after first seeing Christ at Emmaus, Breius officially proclaimed:

“This gorgeous work by Vermeer, the great Vermeer from Delft, has emerged from the dark—thank God!—where it had been hidden for years . . . When I was shown this masterpiece I had difficulty controlling my emotions . . . It radiates with a depth of feeling not found in any of his other works.”

Really?

Meanwhile Hitler and Goering were helping themselves and stockpiling as many of Europe’s treasures as they could. Desperate to keep the newly discovered “Vermeer” from getting in the hands of the Nazis, a group of wealthy Dutchmen bought Christ at Emmaus for the equivalent of $2.6 million or approximately $40 million in today’s terms.

Unlike Hitler, Goering had not been able to obtain a Vermeer for his collection, so he was ripe for the picking when Van Meegeren’s Christ with Woman Taken in Adultery showed up. Goering traded a cache of looted art work for the painting that became his most prized possession (and he had accumulated a LOT of stuff).

It was just after the war that van Meegeren was finally exposed. Far from being reviled for his crimes, van Meegeren became a sort of folk hero for having swindled Nazi fat-cat Goering. In a turn of the darkest poetic justice, Goering learned the truth about his precious Vermeer just as he was about to be hanged for war crimes.

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